BasilMuse
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Guitar Hero II
2006
Estimated read time: 6~ minutes.
I have terrible rhythm—I can synchronize, but that's about it—but I love this game. I practically can't beat Rhythm Heaven (might dive into that at some point), but I adore these tours and subpar live recording album-tier covers with completely nonsense maps that make the guitar play the piano, horns, etc.; not because it makes sense but because it's simply fun.
The intro goes incredibly hard. I think it perfectly represents the series as a whole. Even though Guitar Hero III is widely considered the best by a decent margin, I’m partial to II for its crust. Although one very nice feature starting here was they realized people were buying various types of RPTVs and plasmas, so they implemented a calibration screen to make the game playable in the new era of TVs with high latency (40+ms!!).
I’ve always had stage fright, particularly if it ever involved singing. Despite that, I walk through those venue doors, nervous and frankly embarrassed; social anxiety is a bitch. But my love was secretly listening to hard rock, metal, prog rock and metal, maybe a bit of trance here ‘n’ there. I Am here to enjoy some fucking music, meet fellow musicians, and hopefully grow as one.
You know what I found, though?
The fakest fuckers on the planet lamenting about not being popular enough or whatever. "What about me?" What about you? Another cold burnout song about how much everyone else sucks? Wow, how revelatory, you really shook up the scene today. I'm sure we'll quake in our boots at the idea of your sniggering, side-eyeing, nonchalant disregard and elitism leaving the venue and being laid to rest. I just want to play Guitar Hero for God’s sake!
Do you even understand fun? Talking about playing for the music, the esoterica and innate joy of it all, but it sure doesn't seem like it, not unless it's doing literally the same thing you decry the rest of the bands of doing: low effort punk rock with a bit of crass lyrics in there poisoned with irony, but then you make it worse by painting it with the veneer of artistic understanding and passion. Where is it? You seem content to hide it all up in a little heart-shaped box you’ve deemed only your little act worthy of being privy to.
Also, did you really have to do all that at karaoke night? Unplugging the amp and making a speech about it? Telling people they just don't get it and aren't singing for the right reasons? That punk night is dead! Do you even hear yourself? It's just some karaoke; get over yourself.
Go do your own tour or whatever; literally nobody asked you to leave, but I bet you’ll pretend you were kicked to the curb anyways. Showered in praise, yet you hyper-fixate on a couple of dissenters that pop up throughout the year? Who cares! The next set’s about to be played!
You were never here for the music, and it's no wonder you're completely and utterly obsessed with eras you were barely sentient for, or worse, not even around for. You can't get over the fact that time marches forward without you, someone new showing up one day and curb stomping you at your own act; it's humbling, but rather than take it on stride, you grimace, forcing a pained smile as you pat them on the back for performing so well. But it's clear that this was a massive blow to your ego. Maybe you can convince yourself it doesn't hurt so much if you only care about your fellow burnouts quitting emo and declaring the rest of the venue a madhouse.
It hurts, because I thought your act was pretty cool. I guess it’s pretty “punk rock” to jeer and give the cold shoulder though, right? Maybe it’s in spirit, maybe it’s hypocritical of me, whatever.
Throughout my musical journey it’s been nothing but revitalizing, igniting the flame once more for the medium I held so dear. I was berated and constantly mocked for my love of music, especially metal, combined with curve balls left and right, losing loved ones (or what few I would call those), I became very disillusioned with how people behave. It was branching out and stepping out of my comfort zone, keeping my chin up even in the face of pretentious acts that my love for music only grew more. Yeah, it sucked that some of my favorite bands became increasingly misanthropic, but why should that stop me? Why should it stop any of us? It was never about those assholes; it was about the music- their words, not mine. Well, their words until it was just about themselves. I’ll stop now, I’ve got a set to play whether or not people show up. It’ll probably be mediocre! I don’t care.
Punk rock never died. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Goodnight.
Favorite track: The Sword - Freya
Unrelated music highlight: The Mothers of Invention (Live in London, ‘68)
I have terrible rhythm—I can synchronize, but that's about it—but I love this game. I practically can't beat Rhythm Heaven (might dive into that at some point), but I adore these tours and subpar live recording album-tier covers with completely nonsense maps that make the guitar play the piano, horns, etc.; not because it makes sense but because it's simply fun.
The intro goes incredibly hard. I think it perfectly represents the series as a whole. Even though Guitar Hero III is widely considered the best by a decent margin, I’m partial to II for its crust. Although one very nice feature starting here was they realized people were buying various types of RPTVs and plasmas, so they implemented a calibration screen to make the game playable in the new era of TVs with high latency (40+ms!!).
I’ve always had stage fright, particularly if it ever involved singing. Despite that, I walk through those venue doors, nervous and frankly embarrassed; social anxiety is a bitch. But my love was secretly listening to hard rock, metal, prog rock and metal, maybe a bit of trance here ‘n’ there. I Am here to enjoy some fucking music, meet fellow musicians, and hopefully grow as one.
You know what I found, though?
The fakest fuckers on the planet lamenting about not being popular enough or whatever. "What about me?" What about you? Another cold burnout song about how much everyone else sucks? Wow, how revelatory, you really shook up the scene today. I'm sure we'll quake in our boots at the idea of your sniggering, side-eyeing, nonchalant disregard and elitism leaving the venue and being laid to rest. I just want to play Guitar Hero for God’s sake!
Do you even understand fun? Talking about playing for the music, the esoterica and innate joy of it all, but it sure doesn't seem like it, not unless it's doing literally the same thing you decry the rest of the bands of doing: low effort punk rock with a bit of crass lyrics in there poisoned with irony, but then you make it worse by painting it with the veneer of artistic understanding and passion. Where is it? You seem content to hide it all up in a little heart-shaped box you’ve deemed only your little act worthy of being privy to.
Also, did you really have to do all that at karaoke night? Unplugging the amp and making a speech about it? Telling people they just don't get it and aren't singing for the right reasons? That punk night is dead! Do you even hear yourself? It's just some karaoke; get over yourself.
Go do your own tour or whatever; literally nobody asked you to leave, but I bet you’ll pretend you were kicked to the curb anyways. Showered in praise, yet you hyper-fixate on a couple of dissenters that pop up throughout the year? Who cares! The next set’s about to be played!
You were never here for the music, and it's no wonder you're completely and utterly obsessed with eras you were barely sentient for, or worse, not even around for. You can't get over the fact that time marches forward without you, someone new showing up one day and curb stomping you at your own act; it's humbling, but rather than take it on stride, you grimace, forcing a pained smile as you pat them on the back for performing so well. But it's clear that this was a massive blow to your ego. Maybe you can convince yourself it doesn't hurt so much if you only care about your fellow burnouts quitting emo and declaring the rest of the venue a madhouse.
It hurts, because I thought your act was pretty cool. I guess it’s pretty “punk rock” to jeer and give the cold shoulder though, right? Maybe it’s in spirit, maybe it’s hypocritical of me, whatever.
Throughout my musical journey it’s been nothing but revitalizing, igniting the flame once more for the medium I held so dear. I was berated and constantly mocked for my love of music, especially metal, combined with curve balls left and right, losing loved ones (or what few I would call those), I became very disillusioned with how people behave. It was branching out and stepping out of my comfort zone, keeping my chin up even in the face of pretentious acts that my love for music only grew more. Yeah, it sucked that some of my favorite bands became increasingly misanthropic, but why should that stop me? Why should it stop any of us? It was never about those assholes; it was about the music- their words, not mine. Well, their words until it was just about themselves. I’ll stop now, I’ve got a set to play whether or not people show up. It’ll probably be mediocre! I don’t care.
Punk rock never died. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Goodnight.
Favorite track: The Sword - Freya
Unrelated music highlight: The Mothers of Invention (Live in London, ‘68)
I love me a 2d metroidvania. Something about the mix of platforming and collecting trinkets behind various locked doors appeals to me so much that, if the aesthetic is right, I'll spend hours playing even the most mechanically mid title in the genre. As proof, I will state that I had 100%'d Guacamelee not once, but twice. This is all to say that, even if The Lost Crown hooked me in like the rest of them just by virtue of sharing that core, I feel like there are genuine merits that make it worth recommending.
First off, the presentation is outstanding for the genre. The art style is pleasing and the 2d/3d perspective allows for some really cool backgrounds with a sense of depth to them. Each area has a distinctive atmosphere and they offer some visual surprises along the way. The real sauce is, however, in the cutscenes that frequently not only burst with color but also veer into shonen anime territory with its camerawork and animations. But instead of making the game look generic it forms a solid foundation for hype moments and dynamic boss battles and makes the increase in scale during the finale feel less awkward. I did not know that I needed Prince of Persia to do a kamehameha, but the devs were right. Also worth mentioning that the game is fully voiced, and we've got decent voice acting, at least for the main cast. The score is done by Gareth Coker of the Ori and the Blind Forest fame, but it sidesteps both the loud sentimental pathos of that work and the common "eastern music" pastiche, most likely due to him collaborating with an Iranian composer, Samar Rad.
The writing is a bit of a mixed bag. Some bits feel lazy (like calling a group of heroes the Immortals in a story about corrupted humans trying to ascend to godhood, a bit on the nose there), some underdeveloped (Sargon seems to experience a neat character transformation from a brash youth to a hardened wise warrior on paper, but it's nigh imperceptible in the actual game). On the whole it's just solid, but what I find truly fascinating is how it conjures up a fascinating world full of Borges-like legends and characters. It's especially refreshing to see a time travel narrative that doesn't try to spin the old tale about actions and their consequences, but rather presents you with a messy tangle of alternative threads that intersect and interact freely. The bifurcations of the garden of forking paths presented not as a rigid system of parallel timelines but as a tool of infinite possibilities.
But it's the gameplay that really shines here. Now, The Lost Crown doesn't really present that many new ideas of its own. Screenshots you can put on the map as markers is one, and I welcome this approach as opposed to the excessive linearity of the recent Metroid games. But pretty much everything else you've already seen in one metroidvania or another. We got all the hits: wall jumping, air dashing, switching between two worlds, boomerang weapon, keys as keys and movement abilities as keys. But The Lost Crown combines all of these familiar elements into a neat package combined with good level and combat design, and it's polished to the point of being one of the best feeling 2d platformers in general.
Here's an example. Your combat options initially are limited two just two buttons: one for a sword attack and one for a parry. Your sword attacks can be chained into a combo, and various directional inputs result in different moves, but that's all standard stuff. The parry, however, isn't as powerful and brain dead as you might initially think. It's not like Samus Returns where you can confidently bait an attack within a second of seeing an enemy and nuke it with a press of a button. Here it's more of a shield that you need to time with the incoming attacks to block them. You can only return damage from parrying a special color-coded attack, and those are not as frequent, while in boss fights they are mostly used as an opportunity for visual spectacle. Still, blocking attacks requires timing and learning the enemy's moveset. Some of them use feints to fake you out (including one enemy whose attack animations play out backwards). Some annoy you by being out of reach in the air. All of them have unblockable attacks that require a dodge, but, crucially, the dodge's i-frames are strict enough that you'll get punished for a misplaced or a mistimed one. So combat becomes a matter of dynamic positioning, and a group of enemies can easily overwhelm you even in the game's second half. And I'm sorry if that comes off as excessive praise for a combat system whose sole merit is merely being thought out, but coming to this after the Ori games sure feels good.
This also applies to level design. The opening section guides you along a linear path, but it does so through bits of multiple areas and actually provides enough space for you to explore even with your starting kit. Probably the most suprising thing about the first couple hours of the game is just how easy it is to choose a random exit and find out the path keeps going to some place else that doesn't seem to be the objective. You can stumble and make your way into this game's Blighttown a fair bit before hitting a wall, if you're persistent enough. Not to mention that the designers regularly put in sick platforming sequences that feel amazing to pull off. But then that's to be expected from the devs of Rayman Legends.
The one obvious blemish is that the game's more buggy that it has any right being. I've experienced falling out of bounds, zipping, lingering animation effects, scripts not working immediately after a cutscene and, very frequently, every object on the map resetting into its intended state as you enter a room. This is nothing game-breaking, and god knows new releases these days are held together by duct tape as a rule, but it is disappointing to see a smaller scale title with dozens of QA specialists still release in this state (with early access, no less).
First off, the presentation is outstanding for the genre. The art style is pleasing and the 2d/3d perspective allows for some really cool backgrounds with a sense of depth to them. Each area has a distinctive atmosphere and they offer some visual surprises along the way. The real sauce is, however, in the cutscenes that frequently not only burst with color but also veer into shonen anime territory with its camerawork and animations. But instead of making the game look generic it forms a solid foundation for hype moments and dynamic boss battles and makes the increase in scale during the finale feel less awkward. I did not know that I needed Prince of Persia to do a kamehameha, but the devs were right. Also worth mentioning that the game is fully voiced, and we've got decent voice acting, at least for the main cast. The score is done by Gareth Coker of the Ori and the Blind Forest fame, but it sidesteps both the loud sentimental pathos of that work and the common "eastern music" pastiche, most likely due to him collaborating with an Iranian composer, Samar Rad.
The writing is a bit of a mixed bag. Some bits feel lazy (like calling a group of heroes the Immortals in a story about corrupted humans trying to ascend to godhood, a bit on the nose there), some underdeveloped (Sargon seems to experience a neat character transformation from a brash youth to a hardened wise warrior on paper, but it's nigh imperceptible in the actual game). On the whole it's just solid, but what I find truly fascinating is how it conjures up a fascinating world full of Borges-like legends and characters. It's especially refreshing to see a time travel narrative that doesn't try to spin the old tale about actions and their consequences, but rather presents you with a messy tangle of alternative threads that intersect and interact freely. The bifurcations of the garden of forking paths presented not as a rigid system of parallel timelines but as a tool of infinite possibilities.
But it's the gameplay that really shines here. Now, The Lost Crown doesn't really present that many new ideas of its own. Screenshots you can put on the map as markers is one, and I welcome this approach as opposed to the excessive linearity of the recent Metroid games. But pretty much everything else you've already seen in one metroidvania or another. We got all the hits: wall jumping, air dashing, switching between two worlds, boomerang weapon, keys as keys and movement abilities as keys. But The Lost Crown combines all of these familiar elements into a neat package combined with good level and combat design, and it's polished to the point of being one of the best feeling 2d platformers in general.
Here's an example. Your combat options initially are limited two just two buttons: one for a sword attack and one for a parry. Your sword attacks can be chained into a combo, and various directional inputs result in different moves, but that's all standard stuff. The parry, however, isn't as powerful and brain dead as you might initially think. It's not like Samus Returns where you can confidently bait an attack within a second of seeing an enemy and nuke it with a press of a button. Here it's more of a shield that you need to time with the incoming attacks to block them. You can only return damage from parrying a special color-coded attack, and those are not as frequent, while in boss fights they are mostly used as an opportunity for visual spectacle. Still, blocking attacks requires timing and learning the enemy's moveset. Some of them use feints to fake you out (including one enemy whose attack animations play out backwards). Some annoy you by being out of reach in the air. All of them have unblockable attacks that require a dodge, but, crucially, the dodge's i-frames are strict enough that you'll get punished for a misplaced or a mistimed one. So combat becomes a matter of dynamic positioning, and a group of enemies can easily overwhelm you even in the game's second half. And I'm sorry if that comes off as excessive praise for a combat system whose sole merit is merely being thought out, but coming to this after the Ori games sure feels good.
This also applies to level design. The opening section guides you along a linear path, but it does so through bits of multiple areas and actually provides enough space for you to explore even with your starting kit. Probably the most suprising thing about the first couple hours of the game is just how easy it is to choose a random exit and find out the path keeps going to some place else that doesn't seem to be the objective. You can stumble and make your way into this game's Blighttown a fair bit before hitting a wall, if you're persistent enough. Not to mention that the designers regularly put in sick platforming sequences that feel amazing to pull off. But then that's to be expected from the devs of Rayman Legends.
The one obvious blemish is that the game's more buggy that it has any right being. I've experienced falling out of bounds, zipping, lingering animation effects, scripts not working immediately after a cutscene and, very frequently, every object on the map resetting into its intended state as you enter a room. This is nothing game-breaking, and god knows new releases these days are held together by duct tape as a rule, but it is disappointing to see a smaller scale title with dozens of QA specialists still release in this state (with early access, no less).
Soul Hackers 2
2022
Soul Hackers 2 has a meal mechanic. Throughout the game you can obtain various dishes: buy them in stores, get them from your companions etc. These dishes have different effects on the dungeon crawling part of the game. Some dishes give you HP regen, others give plain stat boosts or make critical hits more likely to occur. Standard stuff. But there's one more side to this mechanic that further complicates things. Every time you eat a meal you watch a short cutscene in which your party members share their opinions on it. Afterwards, you can see who likes or dislikes a particular dish when choosing what to eat from the menu. So, you are now tasked with choosing not only a meal that will suit your goals in upcoming dungeon exploration, but also choosing the right combination of meal buff and companion affinity. Obviously, every one of your party members has their own preferences and it's impossible to cater to everyone's tastes, so you usually have to make some sacrifices.
Except you don't have to. Whether or not your party members will enjoy the meal has absolutely no bearing on how potent the meal's effects are going to be. Further on, whenever you have a meal someone from your party is always absent anyway, so their opinion is not accounted for. So why does this exist, and why do I get loading screen tips on the various types of affinity each party member can have towards a dish?
I have no answer, but I think this tiny bit actually encapsulates Soul Hackers 2 as a whole rather well. It's something that tries to pose for an actual gameplay mechanic but ends up being empty gesturing towards character interaction. Appropriate for a game that feels like a bunch of concept art that got adapted into being into both a sequel to a 25-year old game and the third core pillar of the entire SMT franchise, marrying the dungeon crawling of the mainline games with the approachable nature and story focus of the Persona series. Yes, it is a sequel to Soul Hackers and it retains a lot of the concepts from the previous title, but whereas that game's cyberpunk setting was an important component of atmosphere and the story's themes (explicitly delving into society's acceptance of new invasive technology under late capitalism), here it's just familiar neon set dressing that has very little to do with what the story actually does. Yes, the gameplay does carve its own niche in the franchise, but the dungeons are disgustingly basic and boring, the combat is somehow grindier than ever, and all the narrative free estate is spent on a shonen version of The Fifth Element (1997).
Usually when I don't like something I can at least see the intent behind whatever it is that isn't working for me. It could be a lack of polish, a writing issue, a gameplay nuisance, but it's usually a particular flaw in the game's working system or creative vision that you can still glean from the final product and appreciate. Soul Hackers 2 just feels like it doesn't have anything cohesive like that beneath the surface. It's just fluff meeting the bare requirements of an RPG stretched into a 40 hour game and wrapped in a pretty full-price package. (And don't even get me started on that DLC.)
Except you don't have to. Whether or not your party members will enjoy the meal has absolutely no bearing on how potent the meal's effects are going to be. Further on, whenever you have a meal someone from your party is always absent anyway, so their opinion is not accounted for. So why does this exist, and why do I get loading screen tips on the various types of affinity each party member can have towards a dish?
I have no answer, but I think this tiny bit actually encapsulates Soul Hackers 2 as a whole rather well. It's something that tries to pose for an actual gameplay mechanic but ends up being empty gesturing towards character interaction. Appropriate for a game that feels like a bunch of concept art that got adapted into being into both a sequel to a 25-year old game and the third core pillar of the entire SMT franchise, marrying the dungeon crawling of the mainline games with the approachable nature and story focus of the Persona series. Yes, it is a sequel to Soul Hackers and it retains a lot of the concepts from the previous title, but whereas that game's cyberpunk setting was an important component of atmosphere and the story's themes (explicitly delving into society's acceptance of new invasive technology under late capitalism), here it's just familiar neon set dressing that has very little to do with what the story actually does. Yes, the gameplay does carve its own niche in the franchise, but the dungeons are disgustingly basic and boring, the combat is somehow grindier than ever, and all the narrative free estate is spent on a shonen version of The Fifth Element (1997).
Usually when I don't like something I can at least see the intent behind whatever it is that isn't working for me. It could be a lack of polish, a writing issue, a gameplay nuisance, but it's usually a particular flaw in the game's working system or creative vision that you can still glean from the final product and appreciate. Soul Hackers 2 just feels like it doesn't have anything cohesive like that beneath the surface. It's just fluff meeting the bare requirements of an RPG stretched into a 40 hour game and wrapped in a pretty full-price package. (And don't even get me started on that DLC.)
Manages to be an incredibly uneven experience with themes of progression, regression, and alienation, but is somehow not annoyingly self-aware about these issues being so ironically fitting. There are many games in the series I like more than this, but as a showcase of pure excess and indulgence this is fascinating. I love and hate this in about equal measure, but the thing that really frustrates me is my inability to feel strongly about its actual narrative goings-on.
Sure, I shouted and yelled at the stupid overexplained plot twists that make it worse, and I was excited at the setpieces, but it’s scattershot and incapable of selling emotional plot beats or conveying the interesting parts of its themes past expositing about them. Similarly, the underlying mechanics and control scheme are a series best (yes, better than V, fight me) but the dearth of stealth is made more painful when almost nothing is actually tested. Guards are rarely in interesting compositions or threatening patrols, and they’re so spread out that you can get in straight-up gunfights at times and not draw any ire. The few occasions that they break from this (the first part of Act 1, the second half of the final portion of Act 2, the climactic sneaking section in Act 5) are exhilarating and offer the same ass-clenching excitement and complex movement as the very best this series has to offer - as long as you do something other than tranq headshotting, because they decided to give you the MGS2 tranq pistol again except with effectively infinite ammo and a faster tranq time, for some fucking reason.
The narrative has a similar tendency to actively undercut its best elements, and once again you kind of have to go against what it itself is trying to guide you towards to actually fuck with what it’s putting down. MGS’ tonal variety, uncompromising quirkiness, and deeply human immaturity are all important parts of the series, but there’s a usual command of tone that is not present here. The sense of indulgence harms pacing a lot, giving emotional beats plenty of time to go stale before they’re followed up on or just outright ruining moments that the direction is trying to play as something you feel strongly about.
Other games have these issues at times (I’m sorry, Kojima, but I laughed at Otacon shouting “E-E!” when I was twelve and I’ll laugh at it when I’m ninety) but there’s a sense of cohesion and clarity granted by their commitment to a specific narrative and tone. The B&B Unit is the lowest point of mainline MGS because of its failure to do the same. I think what he was going for is conceptually cool; discussing the effects of endless war and using it to convey dehumanization both through literal war machines as well as overt fetishization is not an inherently bad idea, but the final execution fails to evoke any sense of real dissonance or horror because of the comical levels of ogling its blocking and camerawork indulge in. Shoving a woman’s pussy in the player’s face while she cries and vomits doesn’t really make me reflect on much, it just makes me want to fire Kojima out of a cannon into the sun.
The general inability to write women as something knowable or as people the male cast are capable of empathizing with is especially dire when motherhood is another one of the game’s main motifs alongside sensation, alienation, progression, regression, aligning the series timeline, misanthrophy, late capitalism, finding confidence in new technology and new people even as the world goes to hell, and, and, and...
As a whole, MGS4 is incapable of combining those threads, as its thematics are sidelined for plot-driven exertion as it attempts the unification of PS1 Tom Clancy theatrics with a cold Baudrillardian cyberpunk thriller, a sixties Bond homage, and Portable Ops into a single aesthetically, tonally, and narratively coherent series. The Metal Gear Solid Timeline was never a major point of consideration prior to this and the desperate attempt to connect it all is mostly accomplished via the majority of the cast being completely different characters with new designs, motivations, voices, and intentions.
Romance in this game is also handled awkwardly. I’m not touching “a man who shits himself for a living negs a woman into marriage” with a ten-foot pole, but it’s worth noting that Otacon’s grief over losing another love interest isn’t really as much about her loss but more because he’s frustrated that he had another woman die before he could fuck them. I think character assassination is cool, sometimes, and I think even Otacon’s plot beat here is something probably with degrees of intentionality, but it is intensely difficult to read charitably when this work is so unempathetic and afraid of its women.
You know a character whose shift for the worse is handled awesomely? Snake! I fucking LOVE Old Snake. His regression from his MGS2 personality into his frostier, more dick-ass MGS1 characterization makes total sense and the Psyche Gauge is a fantastic way to illustrate his insecurity and fragility. His circumstances are horrific, but the reaction to a joke of his bombing is almost as emotionally devastating as discovering he has six months to live and three months before he turns into a WMD. He combines the parallel threads of MGS and remains narratively engaging, aesthetically satisfying, genuinely hilarious, and emotionally-driven throughout.
The sections that connect most strongly to him and his struggle are generally my favorite parts of the game. Act 1 is really cool for how alienated he is from the conflict, being hot-dropped into “the middle east” (where? go fuck yourself, it’s terrorist country and it’s all indistinguishable to an american like you!) and given zero context for the war. The game incentivizes you to make huge shifts in this battle and tip the scales purely out of convenience to your unrelated efforts, and asking myself what I was really doing there was genuinely cool. The aesthetic language of seventh-gen modern military shooters is used to near-parody levels here and is then completely flipped with the insertion of psychotic MGS shenanigans and the protagonist’s frailty. His relationship with Raiden is the most consistently well-written, well-directed, well-blocked, and well-acted shit in the entire game, on top of Raiden’s stuff in this game being the coolest action in fiction. Act 4’s first few minutes got me genuinely wistful and misty-eyed even as I’d only played MGS1 for the first time earlier in the week*, and the final boss is deserving of its hype.
Basically everything to do with Big Boss and his former friends is a swing and a miss. The retcon introduced with Portable Ops is basically what ruined the plot of literally every single game in the entire franchise from that point onwards and I really wish that Kojima just treated it as non-canon and did his own fucking thing. The Christ and Eden symbolism in Act 3 makes me retroactively dislike similar elements in MGS3, even though that was a good deal less annoying about it. The ending’s emotionality is ruined so fucking hard by 25 minutes of exposition about its connection to MGS3 that I genuinely kind of think it should’ve ended at the expected point for the credits.
MGS4 offers an attempt to conclude a series while trying to build sequel hooks for a new generation of designers to take the reins, using the game’s increasing fascination with the PS3’s hardware and gimmicks as a genuine metaphor for learning to accept the present and future for what they are. It’s agonizing that these few moments of optimism go unrequited. This wasn’t the finale, none of the seeds sown here bore fruit, and instead of entering a new era, the same man made games trapped in their own stifling shadows. Instead of facing the future, the tides of the 2010s subsumed another and made alienated, nostalgic, and ultimately desolate attempts at a follow-up.
*Yes, I played every other mainline before starting 1 and 4. I didn’t grow up with a playstation and only recently could emulate MGS4, please understand :meowcry:
Sure, I shouted and yelled at the stupid overexplained plot twists that make it worse, and I was excited at the setpieces, but it’s scattershot and incapable of selling emotional plot beats or conveying the interesting parts of its themes past expositing about them. Similarly, the underlying mechanics and control scheme are a series best (yes, better than V, fight me) but the dearth of stealth is made more painful when almost nothing is actually tested. Guards are rarely in interesting compositions or threatening patrols, and they’re so spread out that you can get in straight-up gunfights at times and not draw any ire. The few occasions that they break from this (the first part of Act 1, the second half of the final portion of Act 2, the climactic sneaking section in Act 5) are exhilarating and offer the same ass-clenching excitement and complex movement as the very best this series has to offer - as long as you do something other than tranq headshotting, because they decided to give you the MGS2 tranq pistol again except with effectively infinite ammo and a faster tranq time, for some fucking reason.
The narrative has a similar tendency to actively undercut its best elements, and once again you kind of have to go against what it itself is trying to guide you towards to actually fuck with what it’s putting down. MGS’ tonal variety, uncompromising quirkiness, and deeply human immaturity are all important parts of the series, but there’s a usual command of tone that is not present here. The sense of indulgence harms pacing a lot, giving emotional beats plenty of time to go stale before they’re followed up on or just outright ruining moments that the direction is trying to play as something you feel strongly about.
Other games have these issues at times (I’m sorry, Kojima, but I laughed at Otacon shouting “E-E!” when I was twelve and I’ll laugh at it when I’m ninety) but there’s a sense of cohesion and clarity granted by their commitment to a specific narrative and tone. The B&B Unit is the lowest point of mainline MGS because of its failure to do the same. I think what he was going for is conceptually cool; discussing the effects of endless war and using it to convey dehumanization both through literal war machines as well as overt fetishization is not an inherently bad idea, but the final execution fails to evoke any sense of real dissonance or horror because of the comical levels of ogling its blocking and camerawork indulge in. Shoving a woman’s pussy in the player’s face while she cries and vomits doesn’t really make me reflect on much, it just makes me want to fire Kojima out of a cannon into the sun.
The general inability to write women as something knowable or as people the male cast are capable of empathizing with is especially dire when motherhood is another one of the game’s main motifs alongside sensation, alienation, progression, regression, aligning the series timeline, misanthrophy, late capitalism, finding confidence in new technology and new people even as the world goes to hell, and, and, and...
As a whole, MGS4 is incapable of combining those threads, as its thematics are sidelined for plot-driven exertion as it attempts the unification of PS1 Tom Clancy theatrics with a cold Baudrillardian cyberpunk thriller, a sixties Bond homage, and Portable Ops into a single aesthetically, tonally, and narratively coherent series. The Metal Gear Solid Timeline was never a major point of consideration prior to this and the desperate attempt to connect it all is mostly accomplished via the majority of the cast being completely different characters with new designs, motivations, voices, and intentions.
Romance in this game is also handled awkwardly. I’m not touching “a man who shits himself for a living negs a woman into marriage” with a ten-foot pole, but it’s worth noting that Otacon’s grief over losing another love interest isn’t really as much about her loss but more because he’s frustrated that he had another woman die before he could fuck them. I think character assassination is cool, sometimes, and I think even Otacon’s plot beat here is something probably with degrees of intentionality, but it is intensely difficult to read charitably when this work is so unempathetic and afraid of its women.
You know a character whose shift for the worse is handled awesomely? Snake! I fucking LOVE Old Snake. His regression from his MGS2 personality into his frostier, more dick-ass MGS1 characterization makes total sense and the Psyche Gauge is a fantastic way to illustrate his insecurity and fragility. His circumstances are horrific, but the reaction to a joke of his bombing is almost as emotionally devastating as discovering he has six months to live and three months before he turns into a WMD. He combines the parallel threads of MGS and remains narratively engaging, aesthetically satisfying, genuinely hilarious, and emotionally-driven throughout.
The sections that connect most strongly to him and his struggle are generally my favorite parts of the game. Act 1 is really cool for how alienated he is from the conflict, being hot-dropped into “the middle east” (where? go fuck yourself, it’s terrorist country and it’s all indistinguishable to an american like you!) and given zero context for the war. The game incentivizes you to make huge shifts in this battle and tip the scales purely out of convenience to your unrelated efforts, and asking myself what I was really doing there was genuinely cool. The aesthetic language of seventh-gen modern military shooters is used to near-parody levels here and is then completely flipped with the insertion of psychotic MGS shenanigans and the protagonist’s frailty. His relationship with Raiden is the most consistently well-written, well-directed, well-blocked, and well-acted shit in the entire game, on top of Raiden’s stuff in this game being the coolest action in fiction. Act 4’s first few minutes got me genuinely wistful and misty-eyed even as I’d only played MGS1 for the first time earlier in the week*, and the final boss is deserving of its hype.
Basically everything to do with Big Boss and his former friends is a swing and a miss. The retcon introduced with Portable Ops is basically what ruined the plot of literally every single game in the entire franchise from that point onwards and I really wish that Kojima just treated it as non-canon and did his own fucking thing. The Christ and Eden symbolism in Act 3 makes me retroactively dislike similar elements in MGS3, even though that was a good deal less annoying about it. The ending’s emotionality is ruined so fucking hard by 25 minutes of exposition about its connection to MGS3 that I genuinely kind of think it should’ve ended at the expected point for the credits.
MGS4 offers an attempt to conclude a series while trying to build sequel hooks for a new generation of designers to take the reins, using the game’s increasing fascination with the PS3’s hardware and gimmicks as a genuine metaphor for learning to accept the present and future for what they are. It’s agonizing that these few moments of optimism go unrequited. This wasn’t the finale, none of the seeds sown here bore fruit, and instead of entering a new era, the same man made games trapped in their own stifling shadows. Instead of facing the future, the tides of the 2010s subsumed another and made alienated, nostalgic, and ultimately desolate attempts at a follow-up.
*Yes, I played every other mainline before starting 1 and 4. I didn’t grow up with a playstation and only recently could emulate MGS4, please understand :meowcry:
My House
2023
My kneejerk reaction is that l feel super weird about loving what is essentially an architectural achievement. I can't help but have, a sense of unease at a lot of the surroundings of this experience. The basic copypasta-like clearly House of Leaves-rip that doesn't really have much of a personal soul to it, and more the boxings of one, just rides on me (especially if the trauma part of that is actually real, which makes things even more complicated). Especially when it pulls memes and such of the internet to congeal here, and especially when I'm literally in an in-progress read of the book that leaves me too numb to feel the lovings of a homage without kind of scoffing at the quality attempt.
,,,on that same token though, it is a homage. A very carefully crafted one that manages to utilize its medium in ways that lift the ech-beginnings into something that emotionally feels haunting and winding. It's a very terrible reduction, but sometimes being a meticulous, loving director can help transcend a pretty shitty script. I really was terrified constantly. I found each exploration vast and visceral. Cheating (because this derg, is scared) doesn't even help when more often than not you get lost in ways that unnerve. Walking down the first long corridor and hitting ~The Labyrinth~ I immediately closed the WAD reflexively knowing there was a beast around the corner. I don't want to even talk about the dogs.
There's a big inner giddiness of "gosh I want to see more like this", a nerd-like love from experience looking at the ins-and-outs of WAD-making, feeling the rush when it's all demystified and going "gosh how did they do this??? Amazing!!" Sicker than suburbs have any real right to be. Manages to defy my usual personal distaste for the 'innovative' meta without a concrete narrative heart (e.g. Inscryption (sorry), Pony Island (not sorry), etc.).
,,,on that same token though, it is a homage. A very carefully crafted one that manages to utilize its medium in ways that lift the ech-beginnings into something that emotionally feels haunting and winding. It's a very terrible reduction, but sometimes being a meticulous, loving director can help transcend a pretty shitty script. I really was terrified constantly. I found each exploration vast and visceral. Cheating (because this derg, is scared) doesn't even help when more often than not you get lost in ways that unnerve. Walking down the first long corridor and hitting ~The Labyrinth~ I immediately closed the WAD reflexively knowing there was a beast around the corner. I don't want to even talk about the dogs.
There's a big inner giddiness of "gosh I want to see more like this", a nerd-like love from experience looking at the ins-and-outs of WAD-making, feeling the rush when it's all demystified and going "gosh how did they do this??? Amazing!!" Sicker than suburbs have any real right to be. Manages to defy my usual personal distaste for the 'innovative' meta without a concrete narrative heart (e.g. Inscryption (sorry), Pony Island (not sorry), etc.).
this did its job of making me excited for 8 and accomplished very little else.
they are showing a willingness to make kiryu as a character and kuroda as an actor extend way fucking further than he did in the prior seven games - i don't think i can even visualize kiryu so consumed by helpless despair that snot is coming out of his nose as he trembles and weeps for any incarnation of the character prior to this, and that flexibility relative to the series baseline is what i appreciated about ichiban. i was dreading kiryu's return for infinite wealth, but i think they might actually have a real angle for him.
that being said, this game sabotages every part of its narrative, mechanical, thematic, tonal, and character construction for 80% of its runtime in the disgustingly cynical decision to make it a $50 game instead of a focused DLC or interlude. if this game was a DLC that shipped without any side content past substories and the ayame network, but used that smaller scope to tell a focused, well-paced narrative without constant utterly horrific pacebreakers this would be fantastic, and you can very much tell that something of that scope was closer to the original intent than this.
until the literal point of no return, there is not a single plot beat in the entire game that doesn't have 5-30 minutes of utter dead air between it and the next thing of value. i have little interest in these games' coliseum matches and this game makes you do them on literally six different fucking occasions. you constantly go between it and the couch, and it means that you become hyper-familiar with exactly two alleyways in sotenbori as you repeatedly walk back and forth between two points of interest instead of these games' ability to make you ping-pong between a variety of locations throughout the world.
it's a fascinating companion piece to 6, both for the obvious narrative connections, but also in the way that both games are fundamentally compromised. 6's insane ambition and messy development create a seamless experience with chunks missing, and a plot that is essentially white noise as their best-laid plans fizzle apart in the pursuit of pure polygon-pushing. it's something i have sympathy for. gaiden is, instead, something that has flashes of true brilliance and pathos, with a unique atmosphere and a real desire to be connective tissue and closure all at once. its failures come from pure fucking greed and a meaningless search for length over focus. i can't forgive it for the fundamental cynicism of the decision to charge $50 for this
they are showing a willingness to make kiryu as a character and kuroda as an actor extend way fucking further than he did in the prior seven games - i don't think i can even visualize kiryu so consumed by helpless despair that snot is coming out of his nose as he trembles and weeps for any incarnation of the character prior to this, and that flexibility relative to the series baseline is what i appreciated about ichiban. i was dreading kiryu's return for infinite wealth, but i think they might actually have a real angle for him.
that being said, this game sabotages every part of its narrative, mechanical, thematic, tonal, and character construction for 80% of its runtime in the disgustingly cynical decision to make it a $50 game instead of a focused DLC or interlude. if this game was a DLC that shipped without any side content past substories and the ayame network, but used that smaller scope to tell a focused, well-paced narrative without constant utterly horrific pacebreakers this would be fantastic, and you can very much tell that something of that scope was closer to the original intent than this.
until the literal point of no return, there is not a single plot beat in the entire game that doesn't have 5-30 minutes of utter dead air between it and the next thing of value. i have little interest in these games' coliseum matches and this game makes you do them on literally six different fucking occasions. you constantly go between it and the couch, and it means that you become hyper-familiar with exactly two alleyways in sotenbori as you repeatedly walk back and forth between two points of interest instead of these games' ability to make you ping-pong between a variety of locations throughout the world.
it's a fascinating companion piece to 6, both for the obvious narrative connections, but also in the way that both games are fundamentally compromised. 6's insane ambition and messy development create a seamless experience with chunks missing, and a plot that is essentially white noise as their best-laid plans fizzle apart in the pursuit of pure polygon-pushing. it's something i have sympathy for. gaiden is, instead, something that has flashes of true brilliance and pathos, with a unique atmosphere and a real desire to be connective tissue and closure all at once. its failures come from pure fucking greed and a meaningless search for length over focus. i can't forgive it for the fundamental cynicism of the decision to charge $50 for this
i recognize fully that this game is a goddamn mess but i love it even so. never played anything quite so dysmorphic, so hateful, so disinterested in its own legacy and in its expectant audience (at least until drakengard 3). that it nevertheless delivers unforgettable moments in spades and pseudoscientific genre kitsch in equal proportion just solidifies it as the mgs franchise writ large, a macrocosm of vestigial feelings, directorial gratuitousness, and creeping entropy. still one of the most interesting in kojimas ouevre, astonished mgsv managed to outpace it in charlatanisms
Elise, my beautiful daughter
You are a woman now, you ought to choose a wife
Will you pick capable and gifted tradwife Freya
Or sharp and intelligent fun wife Lebkuchen
Or homeless hippie from the woods Rozenmarine
...
Ending №5 Star-Crossed
You are a woman now, you ought to choose a wife
Will you pick capable and gifted tradwife Freya
Or sharp and intelligent fun wife Lebkuchen
Or homeless hippie from the woods Rozenmarine
...
Ending №5 Star-Crossed
As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.
I played this game on a whim during the PC release, so I never got to experience the original PS4 release from which Intergrade apparently made many adjustments (changing animation canceling, adding unblockable telegraphs, changing how some materia work, adding quick retries).
When I first played it, I didn’t expect to like the combat much, I was just here to look at pretty characters and listen to good music cuz I was bored by everything else at the time, but was very pleasantly surprised by the combat system in play, so much so, that after reflecting back on it and replaying it multiple times since, I can easily say that this is best new combat system created within the last decade. A focus on resource management, controlling multiple characters at the same time and coordinating their actions, giving each of them compelling action mechanics that can feed into a game plan involving your full party, and nuanced defense compared to most action games make this one stand out from most of its peers. To try to describe why I like this combat system so much, I’d actually first want to talk about my biggest issue with it:
Enemy Health is too low.
Final Fantasy VII Remake’s battle system was designed by Teruki Endo, a Capcom game designer who has worked on the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Tri. Given that Monster Hunter contains my favorite combat in video games bar none, it’s not a surprise I ended up liking this game so much. There are some shared elements in the design enough to make me suspect something after fighting the Type-0 Behemoth. For one, both of these games go out of their way to de-emphasize i-frames as a defensive mechanic, with Monster Hunter having very few to make you to consider many variables when trying to i-frame attacks, and FF7R choosing to have literally none, thus forcing you to heavily consider which attacks are dodgable and which you are better off blocking, and making your choice of direction and situation really matter when it comes to how you use the roll. The current trend of action games thrives on timing-based mechanics and challenges, this game and Monster Hunter are the only modern action games to my knowledge that deliberately make it so that good timing can’t nullify most attacks in the game, and that’s a breath of fresh air unlike any other for me.
To get back to my criticism of the game’s balancing, another similarity is that both of these games are designed with tanky enemies in mind. Much of the depth is placed in the realm of damage optimization. When the enemies are big damage sponges, players are forced to actually interact with the mechanics that allow them to maximize the damage they get from their openings. It’s an easy way to add a lot of depth to fights and make them really replayable as you learn how to take advantage of the patterns better to set up the perfect punishes. Whereas Monster Hunter creates the depth in its damage-dealing through complex weapon movesets that require precision and monster behavior knowledge to take advantage of, FF7R does it through a bevy of system mechanics that govern enemy states; a Stagger system that borrows heavily from FF13 but adjusting its dynamic to be more suited for a real time action game. However, when the enemies die too fast, most of that depth does not come into play.
So let’s get to the nitty gritty: How does this combat system work and how does high health make the game better?
The core mechanic of the game is ATB, a real time translation of the ATB system from the original where you waited for a bar to fill up before being able to perform any actions (spells, items, so on). In Remake, instead you fill up the ATB bar by controlling a character and hitting enemies or blocking attacks. Your choice of character to control is also the choice of who you are giving ATB to, as the other characters only gain ATB slowly when not being controlled. Carried over from the original, defensive and offensive actions both compete for ATB, but with Remake being more of an action game, damage is generally avoidable (but not always) and thus allowing yourself to lose a lot of HP means losing attack opportunities in the future with spending ATB to heal, as well as Mana which is a limited resource on Hard Mode.
I find it important to note the value added by attacks not always being avoidable in this system. Most action games stick to completely avoidable damage because heals/HP often represent a number of mistakes you can make before a Game Over, and healing commitments ala Souls usually just means needing to miss on an attack opportunity before commencing with the regular game, which is good for tension. But in FF7R’s case, the fact that healing takes from a dynamic resource which you actively create with your in-game actions gives it enough depth that it justifies having enemies be able to pepper you with chip damage or giving some bosses unavoidable attacks that make you consider protective spells and pressure you to keep your characters always topped up in health.It makes the resource management all that much more demanding when damaging enemies properly isn't the only thing you are thinking about, and the game goes the extra step of giving you a variety of different healing abilities with varying benefits and costs, allowing you to adjust the way you need to play around Health as a resource. An example would be the difference in using Cure, the regular heal that consumes ATB only heals one character at a time, or Pray, which requires two ATB but uses no mana and acts as a wide heal, letting you save mana for other actions but requiring a bigger commitment to use and smaller healing numbers offset by being an AOE heal.
To get into offensive uses of ATB, it’s mainly used to interact with the Stagger system and it’s what makes using all the characters effectively so important. The basic rules of this system is that all enemies have a Stagger bar under their regular health bar, which starts empty and when filled up puts enemies into a Stagger state (BURST in the Japanese version of the game) where the damage dealt is multiplied for a short period of time. The way in which the player increases the Stagger bar is something that can change completely depending on the enemy, but generally to really Stagger efficiently you need to put the enemy in Pressure state (HEAT in Japanese) where the enemy takes multiplied stagger damage. For most enemies hitting them enough or using elemental weaknesses can put them in Pressure state, and then using certain abilities that deal high stagger damage puts them in Stagger very quickly, and from then you use your pure high damage abilities to take advantage of the multiplier…
But an issue arises! Using your ATB bar to induce the Stagger state as quickly as possible often means you don’t have any ATB left to actually do much damage during your short burst window as your regular attacks don’t actually do much damage, making it feel wasteful and causing you to go back to square one trying to fill the stagger bar again. Careful management of all characters is how you play around this.
An example situation early in the game would be to have Cloud induce the Pressure state with his flurry of attacks, but not before you are sure Barret has a bar of ATB ready to hit them with Focused Shot once Pressure is induced, while Cloud saves his bar to deal big damage in the burst window. Another option would be delaying when you induce the stagger, use character specific mechanics or materia setups that give you additional ATB when you need them, and many other possibilities. But the point is that you can easily overspend ATB to achieve Stagger, and the ways you can prevent this and balance this create very compelling moment-to-moment decision making and planning.
All the characters have extra mechanics that add layers to this Stagger system and ATB management. Barret has a big attack on a cooldown which gives an ATB on use, a free bar on short notice whenever needed while the cooldown is up, but it also makes you constantly need to keep Barret’s cooldown in your head while you switch to the other characters who are more efficient at dealing damage on their own so you can be ready to switch back to him when the time is needed. Tifa has a system where she can buff herself and expend those buffs to perform attacks that increase the Stagger damage multiplier, making you need to spend ATB stock her up with buffs before the Stagger is induced and having her do her attacks early in the Burst window in order to give other characters the chance take advantage of the increased damage.
But here’s the thing…optimizing ATB usage, becoming proficient at staggering enemies, and needing to consistently learn how to avoid attacks before their damage burns through your MP reserves isn’t something that will matter if the enemy dies too fast. For FF7R’s normal mode, that is the case most of the time, and even in its Hard Mode I’d say enemy health is still too low.
I think what I find amusing about this flaw is how it really is just enemy health that is the issue. The damage they deal is fine, the underlying mechanical design of nearly all the enemies and bosses is excellent, and the systems of the game scale very well. Installing a mod on the PC version that simply doubles the enemy health, making no other changes, actually makes the game a lot better in my opinion while still feeling very balanced and well paced combat wise. It shows how strong the core design of this game is that you can simply beef up stats like that and the skill ceiling is more than high enough for it to work, giving you the room to push yourself and letting you actually get exposed to the design of the enemies when you need to contend with them for much longer.
I get that this combat system can be pretty difficult to play properly and apparently people complained about bosses taking too long even in the vanilla game normal mode but It’s a massive shame that the game locks hard mode behind a full playthrough and it doesn’t give you many variables to adjust your own difficulty, since level ups are forced and your damage/health is always scaling with it. This wouldn’t be a problem if more difficulty options were present, but if the game really didn’t want extra difficulties, items that limit XP growth could have been cool too. Regardless of this, I still loved the game’s gameplay, and the existence of many challenge mods on PC allows the game to realize its full potential and I really recommend trying 2x HP even on your first playthrough.
Now I wanna get to the enemy design. While the regular encounters and enemies can be very fun too, the game shines brightest during boss fights, of which there are many. The game demonstrates very strongly how the mechanics of staggering change heavily per encounter with its first boss, the Scorpion Sentinel, who changes to a different method of stagger in each of its 4 phases. Initially it works like a regular enemy who just needs to be hit with regular attacks and thunder magic until it goes into Pressure state, before using the ATB you stored to use staggering attacks in the pressure window. Then in the second phase you need to hit a weakpoint on its behind to break a shield that makes attacks bounce off otherwise, successfully breaking the shield puts the boss in a very long Pressure state until the shield regens, allowing you to get multiple Staggers if you use the window correctly. The third phase has him only entering Pressure after performing a highly telegraphed laser attack, making you stock up bar in preparation for the attack and take advantage of Barret’s ability to use two ATB for single powerful attack that fills up their Stagger bar, compared to Cloud who cannot fit in two ATB attacks during the Pressure window to stagger the boss. In the fourth phase the boss begins healing itself and requires you to break its legs in order to induce Stagger and stop its self-heal. It’s a crazy demonstration of mechanical variety and maybe one that happens far too early as most players don’t really get the system yet and sadly the balancing means you can beat it with all this stuff going over your head.
This stuff only gets expanded on with more unique and demanding gimmicks. Two notable ones I wanna mention in this review are Hell House and The Valkyrie.
Hell House requires the player to hit the house with elemental magic based on which attack its using, as each attack it performs will change its attunement to a different element. The interesting thing about this is that often the character being attacked does not have the time to cast said magic after dodging the elemental attacks, so it’s up to the other character to cast the spell while the aggro’d one dodges, meaning your opening is not after the attack but during it. The player actually very directly controls the aggro of enemies in this game since they will always target the character you are controlling upon the start of their attack, and due to the different defensive options available to each character, you have to be very careful about when you control a character as Aerith or Barret have much more limited defense to trade off for their ranged attacks and utility, but you still need to find the right time to control them and generate ATB with them but switching back to a more mobile character in time for the next attack.
The Valkyrie is a very interesting boss in Hard Mode, its a flying robot (with an amazing boss track from guest Ace Combat composer) whose final phase adds an orbital laser that tracks the currently controlled character and detonates upon catching up to them, which is something you’re supposed to use to your advantage as the Valkyrie also shields itself during this phase preventing it from taking much damage or stagger but one can break the shield by hitting it with its own laser. On normal mode its a fairly easy task of simply letting the laser catch up to you during the attacks that leave the Valkyrie floating still, made more interesting by the fact that all of the robot’s attacks control space by leaving sleeping gas clouds and fire spots around the arena limiting the way you can move while dodging its attacks and escaping the laser. However on Hard Mode, the behavior of the orbital laser changes completely, instead it now refuses to detonate even when it reaches your position until the Valkyrie hits the controlled character with another one of its attacks and locking said character in hit/block stun, and the laser will detonate inflicting heavy amounts of unavoidable extra damage. It creates a much more interesting dynamic where you either need to forget about trying to bait the laser entirely, needing to rely on much harder tactic of trying to punish it during certain attack animations that turn on Pressure state, or you can also be creative and try to give Barret a buffet of defensive materia and buffs and to allow him to tank the laser at full health and score a stagger that way, but setting up the situation for that is not easy either and requires heavy investment and sacrifices in other areas.
These are just some of the examples of the creative boss design in this game, but there is so many that test you in so many ways, creating new problems with a system that offers many creative and compelling solutions for you to execute. I would be here all day if I were to write about all of them.
Instead I will move on to touch on the Materia system and my few gripes with the game.
Materia serves as your way of having many different builds and possible playstyles for each character, changing your available toolkit and stats to a considerable degree. The most interesting materia are the ones that let you change the flow of ATB in combat, there are ones that allow a character to spread ATB to other characters by spending ATB themselves, or get a free bar by performing three different ATB commands in sequence. Paired materia and its rarity can also lead to interesting playstyle changes, like one that makes a specific character always do a spell of your choice automatically regardless of their available ATB gauge after the player-controlled character does an ATB command.
As far as magic spells go, I really appreciate how the different magics have different properties attached with variable base damage, making them useful for more than just hitting an elemental weakness. Ice is a delayed bomb attack meaning you can’t use it on a moving target without a plan but it deals the highest damage making it useful even on things that aren’t weak to it, Fire is shot as a projectile and thus the angle needs to be considered if you want to hit a certain part of a boss, while Lightning is hitscan and strikes from the sky, allowing it to hit any enemy part with perfect accuracy but it does the least damage as a tradeoff.
In the Intergrade version, the game handles the need to restart fights to change your materia setup to suit the battle pretty well, giving you a quick restart button for every individual fight. However, what sucks is that the game doesn’t have a Materia preset system which I think the game would really benefit from, having to re-arrange your team’s entire materia setup can be kind of a drag sometimes and it would be great if one could save presets and reuse them quickly.
I also don’t love how the game chooses to teach its enemy mechanics, which involves you casting Assess to get a brief description of the strategy you are supposed to use against them. Sometimes even this description is very vague and not helpful. I honestly think this game would benefit from Doom Eternal style tutorialization, which might be an unpopular opinion but I really think for a game as complex as this one having prompts that give you a general idea of what you’re supposed to do works out a lot better than hoping players bumble their way into understanding the mechanics. I also think many of the move descriptions are lacking and make it easy to miss out on the extra mechanics and nuances of each ability, which you can actually find on the Final Fantasy fandom.com wiki which populates its gameplay pages for the game with detailed info taken from the Japanese Ultimania (god bless whoever translated all that info and put it there). Like did you know that Barrett can press his ability button to cancel the recovery of every ATB command with a quick reload that cuts a couple seconds from his cooldown, or that the transition animation from Operator mode to Punisher mode contains a guardpoint that allows Cloud to his Punisher Mode counter attack without needing to be already in Punisher? There are a lot of hidden details to every character’s mechanics.
One final gripe I’m gonna mention is the aerial combat, though its a minor one as not many enemies fly in the first place. It feels pretty awkward and usually your goal is to use ranged attacks and put them in the ground anyways but I wanna bring it up because the sequel to this game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has already been showcased and is overhauling that aspect greatly, making it so characters cannot go into the air automatically by attacking flying enemies and instead you must use specific new synergy attacks or ATB moves that put your character in the air and allow them to go for air combos and dodges while also giving them the ability to cast many abilities in mid-air. One of the bosses they’ve shown explicitly takes advantage of this and is a flying boss from the original that before acted as a way to make you use long range materia, now acts as a way to force you to use all the new aerial combat mechanics to hit it. It’s already making me giddy with excitement for all the potential these mechanics bring.
I really love this game, so much that I find it difficult to write about and describe properly with how many ways it layers its mechanics to create the kind of fun I enjoy. I think it’s already very polished and deep as is, but I am excited to see how they will be refined and expanded upon in the upcoming entries. And if you didn’t feel this way about the combat when you first played this game then I hope reading this has given you some insight into the sheer amount of quality design and inventiveness that I find hiding in its combat system….now if only they would give us better difficulty options in the next game.
I played this game on a whim during the PC release, so I never got to experience the original PS4 release from which Intergrade apparently made many adjustments (changing animation canceling, adding unblockable telegraphs, changing how some materia work, adding quick retries).
When I first played it, I didn’t expect to like the combat much, I was just here to look at pretty characters and listen to good music cuz I was bored by everything else at the time, but was very pleasantly surprised by the combat system in play, so much so, that after reflecting back on it and replaying it multiple times since, I can easily say that this is best new combat system created within the last decade. A focus on resource management, controlling multiple characters at the same time and coordinating their actions, giving each of them compelling action mechanics that can feed into a game plan involving your full party, and nuanced defense compared to most action games make this one stand out from most of its peers. To try to describe why I like this combat system so much, I’d actually first want to talk about my biggest issue with it:
Enemy Health is too low.
Final Fantasy VII Remake’s battle system was designed by Teruki Endo, a Capcom game designer who has worked on the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Tri. Given that Monster Hunter contains my favorite combat in video games bar none, it’s not a surprise I ended up liking this game so much. There are some shared elements in the design enough to make me suspect something after fighting the Type-0 Behemoth. For one, both of these games go out of their way to de-emphasize i-frames as a defensive mechanic, with Monster Hunter having very few to make you to consider many variables when trying to i-frame attacks, and FF7R choosing to have literally none, thus forcing you to heavily consider which attacks are dodgable and which you are better off blocking, and making your choice of direction and situation really matter when it comes to how you use the roll. The current trend of action games thrives on timing-based mechanics and challenges, this game and Monster Hunter are the only modern action games to my knowledge that deliberately make it so that good timing can’t nullify most attacks in the game, and that’s a breath of fresh air unlike any other for me.
To get back to my criticism of the game’s balancing, another similarity is that both of these games are designed with tanky enemies in mind. Much of the depth is placed in the realm of damage optimization. When the enemies are big damage sponges, players are forced to actually interact with the mechanics that allow them to maximize the damage they get from their openings. It’s an easy way to add a lot of depth to fights and make them really replayable as you learn how to take advantage of the patterns better to set up the perfect punishes. Whereas Monster Hunter creates the depth in its damage-dealing through complex weapon movesets that require precision and monster behavior knowledge to take advantage of, FF7R does it through a bevy of system mechanics that govern enemy states; a Stagger system that borrows heavily from FF13 but adjusting its dynamic to be more suited for a real time action game. However, when the enemies die too fast, most of that depth does not come into play.
So let’s get to the nitty gritty: How does this combat system work and how does high health make the game better?
The core mechanic of the game is ATB, a real time translation of the ATB system from the original where you waited for a bar to fill up before being able to perform any actions (spells, items, so on). In Remake, instead you fill up the ATB bar by controlling a character and hitting enemies or blocking attacks. Your choice of character to control is also the choice of who you are giving ATB to, as the other characters only gain ATB slowly when not being controlled. Carried over from the original, defensive and offensive actions both compete for ATB, but with Remake being more of an action game, damage is generally avoidable (but not always) and thus allowing yourself to lose a lot of HP means losing attack opportunities in the future with spending ATB to heal, as well as Mana which is a limited resource on Hard Mode.
I find it important to note the value added by attacks not always being avoidable in this system. Most action games stick to completely avoidable damage because heals/HP often represent a number of mistakes you can make before a Game Over, and healing commitments ala Souls usually just means needing to miss on an attack opportunity before commencing with the regular game, which is good for tension. But in FF7R’s case, the fact that healing takes from a dynamic resource which you actively create with your in-game actions gives it enough depth that it justifies having enemies be able to pepper you with chip damage or giving some bosses unavoidable attacks that make you consider protective spells and pressure you to keep your characters always topped up in health.It makes the resource management all that much more demanding when damaging enemies properly isn't the only thing you are thinking about, and the game goes the extra step of giving you a variety of different healing abilities with varying benefits and costs, allowing you to adjust the way you need to play around Health as a resource. An example would be the difference in using Cure, the regular heal that consumes ATB only heals one character at a time, or Pray, which requires two ATB but uses no mana and acts as a wide heal, letting you save mana for other actions but requiring a bigger commitment to use and smaller healing numbers offset by being an AOE heal.
To get into offensive uses of ATB, it’s mainly used to interact with the Stagger system and it’s what makes using all the characters effectively so important. The basic rules of this system is that all enemies have a Stagger bar under their regular health bar, which starts empty and when filled up puts enemies into a Stagger state (BURST in the Japanese version of the game) where the damage dealt is multiplied for a short period of time. The way in which the player increases the Stagger bar is something that can change completely depending on the enemy, but generally to really Stagger efficiently you need to put the enemy in Pressure state (HEAT in Japanese) where the enemy takes multiplied stagger damage. For most enemies hitting them enough or using elemental weaknesses can put them in Pressure state, and then using certain abilities that deal high stagger damage puts them in Stagger very quickly, and from then you use your pure high damage abilities to take advantage of the multiplier…
But an issue arises! Using your ATB bar to induce the Stagger state as quickly as possible often means you don’t have any ATB left to actually do much damage during your short burst window as your regular attacks don’t actually do much damage, making it feel wasteful and causing you to go back to square one trying to fill the stagger bar again. Careful management of all characters is how you play around this.
An example situation early in the game would be to have Cloud induce the Pressure state with his flurry of attacks, but not before you are sure Barret has a bar of ATB ready to hit them with Focused Shot once Pressure is induced, while Cloud saves his bar to deal big damage in the burst window. Another option would be delaying when you induce the stagger, use character specific mechanics or materia setups that give you additional ATB when you need them, and many other possibilities. But the point is that you can easily overspend ATB to achieve Stagger, and the ways you can prevent this and balance this create very compelling moment-to-moment decision making and planning.
All the characters have extra mechanics that add layers to this Stagger system and ATB management. Barret has a big attack on a cooldown which gives an ATB on use, a free bar on short notice whenever needed while the cooldown is up, but it also makes you constantly need to keep Barret’s cooldown in your head while you switch to the other characters who are more efficient at dealing damage on their own so you can be ready to switch back to him when the time is needed. Tifa has a system where she can buff herself and expend those buffs to perform attacks that increase the Stagger damage multiplier, making you need to spend ATB stock her up with buffs before the Stagger is induced and having her do her attacks early in the Burst window in order to give other characters the chance take advantage of the increased damage.
But here’s the thing…optimizing ATB usage, becoming proficient at staggering enemies, and needing to consistently learn how to avoid attacks before their damage burns through your MP reserves isn’t something that will matter if the enemy dies too fast. For FF7R’s normal mode, that is the case most of the time, and even in its Hard Mode I’d say enemy health is still too low.
I think what I find amusing about this flaw is how it really is just enemy health that is the issue. The damage they deal is fine, the underlying mechanical design of nearly all the enemies and bosses is excellent, and the systems of the game scale very well. Installing a mod on the PC version that simply doubles the enemy health, making no other changes, actually makes the game a lot better in my opinion while still feeling very balanced and well paced combat wise. It shows how strong the core design of this game is that you can simply beef up stats like that and the skill ceiling is more than high enough for it to work, giving you the room to push yourself and letting you actually get exposed to the design of the enemies when you need to contend with them for much longer.
I get that this combat system can be pretty difficult to play properly and apparently people complained about bosses taking too long even in the vanilla game normal mode but It’s a massive shame that the game locks hard mode behind a full playthrough and it doesn’t give you many variables to adjust your own difficulty, since level ups are forced and your damage/health is always scaling with it. This wouldn’t be a problem if more difficulty options were present, but if the game really didn’t want extra difficulties, items that limit XP growth could have been cool too. Regardless of this, I still loved the game’s gameplay, and the existence of many challenge mods on PC allows the game to realize its full potential and I really recommend trying 2x HP even on your first playthrough.
Now I wanna get to the enemy design. While the regular encounters and enemies can be very fun too, the game shines brightest during boss fights, of which there are many. The game demonstrates very strongly how the mechanics of staggering change heavily per encounter with its first boss, the Scorpion Sentinel, who changes to a different method of stagger in each of its 4 phases. Initially it works like a regular enemy who just needs to be hit with regular attacks and thunder magic until it goes into Pressure state, before using the ATB you stored to use staggering attacks in the pressure window. Then in the second phase you need to hit a weakpoint on its behind to break a shield that makes attacks bounce off otherwise, successfully breaking the shield puts the boss in a very long Pressure state until the shield regens, allowing you to get multiple Staggers if you use the window correctly. The third phase has him only entering Pressure after performing a highly telegraphed laser attack, making you stock up bar in preparation for the attack and take advantage of Barret’s ability to use two ATB for single powerful attack that fills up their Stagger bar, compared to Cloud who cannot fit in two ATB attacks during the Pressure window to stagger the boss. In the fourth phase the boss begins healing itself and requires you to break its legs in order to induce Stagger and stop its self-heal. It’s a crazy demonstration of mechanical variety and maybe one that happens far too early as most players don’t really get the system yet and sadly the balancing means you can beat it with all this stuff going over your head.
This stuff only gets expanded on with more unique and demanding gimmicks. Two notable ones I wanna mention in this review are Hell House and The Valkyrie.
Hell House requires the player to hit the house with elemental magic based on which attack its using, as each attack it performs will change its attunement to a different element. The interesting thing about this is that often the character being attacked does not have the time to cast said magic after dodging the elemental attacks, so it’s up to the other character to cast the spell while the aggro’d one dodges, meaning your opening is not after the attack but during it. The player actually very directly controls the aggro of enemies in this game since they will always target the character you are controlling upon the start of their attack, and due to the different defensive options available to each character, you have to be very careful about when you control a character as Aerith or Barret have much more limited defense to trade off for their ranged attacks and utility, but you still need to find the right time to control them and generate ATB with them but switching back to a more mobile character in time for the next attack.
The Valkyrie is a very interesting boss in Hard Mode, its a flying robot (with an amazing boss track from guest Ace Combat composer) whose final phase adds an orbital laser that tracks the currently controlled character and detonates upon catching up to them, which is something you’re supposed to use to your advantage as the Valkyrie also shields itself during this phase preventing it from taking much damage or stagger but one can break the shield by hitting it with its own laser. On normal mode its a fairly easy task of simply letting the laser catch up to you during the attacks that leave the Valkyrie floating still, made more interesting by the fact that all of the robot’s attacks control space by leaving sleeping gas clouds and fire spots around the arena limiting the way you can move while dodging its attacks and escaping the laser. However on Hard Mode, the behavior of the orbital laser changes completely, instead it now refuses to detonate even when it reaches your position until the Valkyrie hits the controlled character with another one of its attacks and locking said character in hit/block stun, and the laser will detonate inflicting heavy amounts of unavoidable extra damage. It creates a much more interesting dynamic where you either need to forget about trying to bait the laser entirely, needing to rely on much harder tactic of trying to punish it during certain attack animations that turn on Pressure state, or you can also be creative and try to give Barret a buffet of defensive materia and buffs and to allow him to tank the laser at full health and score a stagger that way, but setting up the situation for that is not easy either and requires heavy investment and sacrifices in other areas.
These are just some of the examples of the creative boss design in this game, but there is so many that test you in so many ways, creating new problems with a system that offers many creative and compelling solutions for you to execute. I would be here all day if I were to write about all of them.
Instead I will move on to touch on the Materia system and my few gripes with the game.
Materia serves as your way of having many different builds and possible playstyles for each character, changing your available toolkit and stats to a considerable degree. The most interesting materia are the ones that let you change the flow of ATB in combat, there are ones that allow a character to spread ATB to other characters by spending ATB themselves, or get a free bar by performing three different ATB commands in sequence. Paired materia and its rarity can also lead to interesting playstyle changes, like one that makes a specific character always do a spell of your choice automatically regardless of their available ATB gauge after the player-controlled character does an ATB command.
As far as magic spells go, I really appreciate how the different magics have different properties attached with variable base damage, making them useful for more than just hitting an elemental weakness. Ice is a delayed bomb attack meaning you can’t use it on a moving target without a plan but it deals the highest damage making it useful even on things that aren’t weak to it, Fire is shot as a projectile and thus the angle needs to be considered if you want to hit a certain part of a boss, while Lightning is hitscan and strikes from the sky, allowing it to hit any enemy part with perfect accuracy but it does the least damage as a tradeoff.
In the Intergrade version, the game handles the need to restart fights to change your materia setup to suit the battle pretty well, giving you a quick restart button for every individual fight. However, what sucks is that the game doesn’t have a Materia preset system which I think the game would really benefit from, having to re-arrange your team’s entire materia setup can be kind of a drag sometimes and it would be great if one could save presets and reuse them quickly.
I also don’t love how the game chooses to teach its enemy mechanics, which involves you casting Assess to get a brief description of the strategy you are supposed to use against them. Sometimes even this description is very vague and not helpful. I honestly think this game would benefit from Doom Eternal style tutorialization, which might be an unpopular opinion but I really think for a game as complex as this one having prompts that give you a general idea of what you’re supposed to do works out a lot better than hoping players bumble their way into understanding the mechanics. I also think many of the move descriptions are lacking and make it easy to miss out on the extra mechanics and nuances of each ability, which you can actually find on the Final Fantasy fandom.com wiki which populates its gameplay pages for the game with detailed info taken from the Japanese Ultimania (god bless whoever translated all that info and put it there). Like did you know that Barrett can press his ability button to cancel the recovery of every ATB command with a quick reload that cuts a couple seconds from his cooldown, or that the transition animation from Operator mode to Punisher mode contains a guardpoint that allows Cloud to his Punisher Mode counter attack without needing to be already in Punisher? There are a lot of hidden details to every character’s mechanics.
One final gripe I’m gonna mention is the aerial combat, though its a minor one as not many enemies fly in the first place. It feels pretty awkward and usually your goal is to use ranged attacks and put them in the ground anyways but I wanna bring it up because the sequel to this game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has already been showcased and is overhauling that aspect greatly, making it so characters cannot go into the air automatically by attacking flying enemies and instead you must use specific new synergy attacks or ATB moves that put your character in the air and allow them to go for air combos and dodges while also giving them the ability to cast many abilities in mid-air. One of the bosses they’ve shown explicitly takes advantage of this and is a flying boss from the original that before acted as a way to make you use long range materia, now acts as a way to force you to use all the new aerial combat mechanics to hit it. It’s already making me giddy with excitement for all the potential these mechanics bring.
I really love this game, so much that I find it difficult to write about and describe properly with how many ways it layers its mechanics to create the kind of fun I enjoy. I think it’s already very polished and deep as is, but I am excited to see how they will be refined and expanded upon in the upcoming entries. And if you didn’t feel this way about the combat when you first played this game then I hope reading this has given you some insight into the sheer amount of quality design and inventiveness that I find hiding in its combat system….now if only they would give us better difficulty options in the next game.
Alan Wake II
2023
Once the bugs get ironed out, this will be the video game equivalent of House of Leaves: visually inventive, its unique presentation within its medium an artform unto itself, but I don't know if the stuff beyond that will stick in my craw quite like what it draws comparison to.
The lack of both enemy variety AND interesting things to do with the enemies (lack of consistent stuns and/or limb-based damage or hit reactions in general) gets really tedious, and the walk speed is pretty slow relative to the amount of ground these maps want you to cover. They have a "shoot the randomly-determined glowing weak point" mechanic and then make it almost impossible to hit enemies from behind because of their tracking, aggression, and your lack of counterplay.
There's a lot of "but why?"s like it in these mechanics. I really think the pistol upgrade Saga gets that lets you stun enemies with successive headshots should've been a core part of your kit for both, and I STRONGLY question the inclusion of a powerful dodge mechanic that includes an even-stronger perfect dodge. It feels like it's supposed to be your universal stun option, but it's inherently reactive instead of proactive (which, given the lack of other options mid-fight, means everything you're doing past just waiting for them to attack is boring and feels bad) and it also means that ranged enemy types, all one-and-a-half of them, have zero interesting counterplay options.
I'm not sure why they got rid of the "flashlight-is-your-crosshair" conceit they had in Alan 1 when it was distinctive, satisfying, and cool. Inventory management, at least on PC, feels like every interaction has one button press too many, and it's just not very interestingly handled in the first place - it's not as complex as RE4's tetris and it doesn't have the addictive optimization-induced high that successive RE:2 replays tap into. It all being real-time would be cool if you ever had to interact with it in combat, but the hotkeys are generous and the UI is kludgy enough that anything not on them is just not worth equipping mid-fight. Saga's key items list is just flat-out bugged and doesn't remove most of them like it's supposed to, which makes finding the few reusable keys incredibly annoying.
It feels like punching down to write this much about the mechanics when Silent Hill's gameplay is also pretty bad and it's my favorite survival horror series, but Silent Hill is a lot more cohesive with how puzzles, enemy placements, and dungeon designs loop you around encounters (even if they're too damn easy). Alan Wake 2 feels like it wants a lot of Things To Do for the sake of it, and this confounds pacing and requires interactions with the mechanics far more than it or I actually want.
At its (frequent) best, it's instead a set piece-driven linear thrill-ride. Character writing in general touches on cool or relatable conceits and doesn't really know what to do with those ideas outside of these set pieces, even if there are a lot and they're actually sick when they do happen. Alan's plot board allows for a lot of visual inventiveness but runs dry pretty quickly, and it's genuinely astonishing how underused the lamp is after its cool-ass introduction. It entirely ceases to be a resource immediately, and I feel insane thinking about that for too long. His dungeons get progressively shorter as time goes on, or maybe just repetitious enough that I started editing out the downtime in my brain.
Saga's side hews more traditional in structure, aesthetics, and Silent Hill-ass dungeon crawling, and it's generally better for it. Her mind palace mechanic is addictive and rewards engagement with the environment while training the player to be genuinely thoughtful. The route split is strange and outright expects you to finish one side first despite not signposting that, which makes the escalating action that leads into its climax scream to a juddering halt.
I don't want to go into detail with said climax, but I left feeling like it has two amazing ideas with only one getting the execution it deserves. They cooked incredibly hard with tying mechanics, presentation, and narrative to a singular moment of catharsis and then killed whatever momentum built up before or after that before running face-first into an ending that felt like it needed far more deliberation.
My issues with the ending and its narrative momentum were heightened by having a staircase bug out and make me fall through the map every time I sprinted on it, forcing me to lose 2-5 minutes of progress. Remember what I said about walk speed? Still a pretty easy recommend to anybody interested though, and hopefully my issues with the climax get ironed out with NG+ and the DLC. Initiation 4 is worth the price tag on its own. Do wait for bugfixes though, it's really dire.
The lack of both enemy variety AND interesting things to do with the enemies (lack of consistent stuns and/or limb-based damage or hit reactions in general) gets really tedious, and the walk speed is pretty slow relative to the amount of ground these maps want you to cover. They have a "shoot the randomly-determined glowing weak point" mechanic and then make it almost impossible to hit enemies from behind because of their tracking, aggression, and your lack of counterplay.
There's a lot of "but why?"s like it in these mechanics. I really think the pistol upgrade Saga gets that lets you stun enemies with successive headshots should've been a core part of your kit for both, and I STRONGLY question the inclusion of a powerful dodge mechanic that includes an even-stronger perfect dodge. It feels like it's supposed to be your universal stun option, but it's inherently reactive instead of proactive (which, given the lack of other options mid-fight, means everything you're doing past just waiting for them to attack is boring and feels bad) and it also means that ranged enemy types, all one-and-a-half of them, have zero interesting counterplay options.
I'm not sure why they got rid of the "flashlight-is-your-crosshair" conceit they had in Alan 1 when it was distinctive, satisfying, and cool. Inventory management, at least on PC, feels like every interaction has one button press too many, and it's just not very interestingly handled in the first place - it's not as complex as RE4's tetris and it doesn't have the addictive optimization-induced high that successive RE:2 replays tap into. It all being real-time would be cool if you ever had to interact with it in combat, but the hotkeys are generous and the UI is kludgy enough that anything not on them is just not worth equipping mid-fight. Saga's key items list is just flat-out bugged and doesn't remove most of them like it's supposed to, which makes finding the few reusable keys incredibly annoying.
It feels like punching down to write this much about the mechanics when Silent Hill's gameplay is also pretty bad and it's my favorite survival horror series, but Silent Hill is a lot more cohesive with how puzzles, enemy placements, and dungeon designs loop you around encounters (even if they're too damn easy). Alan Wake 2 feels like it wants a lot of Things To Do for the sake of it, and this confounds pacing and requires interactions with the mechanics far more than it or I actually want.
At its (frequent) best, it's instead a set piece-driven linear thrill-ride. Character writing in general touches on cool or relatable conceits and doesn't really know what to do with those ideas outside of these set pieces, even if there are a lot and they're actually sick when they do happen. Alan's plot board allows for a lot of visual inventiveness but runs dry pretty quickly, and it's genuinely astonishing how underused the lamp is after its cool-ass introduction. It entirely ceases to be a resource immediately, and I feel insane thinking about that for too long. His dungeons get progressively shorter as time goes on, or maybe just repetitious enough that I started editing out the downtime in my brain.
Saga's side hews more traditional in structure, aesthetics, and Silent Hill-ass dungeon crawling, and it's generally better for it. Her mind palace mechanic is addictive and rewards engagement with the environment while training the player to be genuinely thoughtful. The route split is strange and outright expects you to finish one side first despite not signposting that, which makes the escalating action that leads into its climax scream to a juddering halt.
I don't want to go into detail with said climax, but I left feeling like it has two amazing ideas with only one getting the execution it deserves. They cooked incredibly hard with tying mechanics, presentation, and narrative to a singular moment of catharsis and then killed whatever momentum built up before or after that before running face-first into an ending that felt like it needed far more deliberation.
My issues with the ending and its narrative momentum were heightened by having a staircase bug out and make me fall through the map every time I sprinted on it, forcing me to lose 2-5 minutes of progress. Remember what I said about walk speed? Still a pretty easy recommend to anybody interested though, and hopefully my issues with the climax get ironed out with NG+ and the DLC. Initiation 4 is worth the price tag on its own. Do wait for bugfixes though, it's really dire.
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